To facilitate rapid adoption of stereoscopic (3D) content among consumers, the ideal in-home 3D systems should be those that can be implemented with minimal or no alteration to existing playback devices such as set-top boxes, DVD, and Blu-ray disc players. They should also be maximally compatible with existing 3D capable displays, such as DLP (see reference 1, incorporated herein by reference in its entirety) displays by Samsung and Mitsubishi, some plasma displays, and polarization based and frame sequential LCD displays.
The desire for full resolution 3D content has led to some systems, such as the Multiview Video Coding (MVC) extension of the MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video coding standard (see reference 3, incorporated herein in by reference in its entirety), to utilize two or more layers, with the base layer representing one view and each enhancement layer representing an additional view, all of which are in the original resolution.
The Scalable Video Coding (SVC) extension to H.264/AVC (Annex G in [2]) defines a multi-layered video coding system for 2D video coding. The SVC extension provides various types of scalability: spatial scalability, quality scalability, temporal scalability, or any combinations thereof. For example, in spatial scalability, a base layer bitstream carries a video signal of a lower spatial resolution, while an enhancement layer bitstream carries additional information, such that when decoded together with the base layer bitstream, a video signal of a higher spatial resolution can be obtained. As another example, in quality scalability, the enhancement layer bitstream carries additional information that can improve the quality of the video signal carried by the base layer bitstream. As will become apparent in the descriptions that follow, the teachings in the present application can further improve the coding performance of a 2D scalable video system such as the SVC system.